Bikepacking With Kids: Northern Rivers Rail Trail Overnighter

My five-year-old son just did his first overnight bikepacking trip: on his own bike, under his own steam, no trailer, no tag-along. With Father's Day coming up, I wanted to write about it rather than put together another straight gear guide, because I reckon the bigger question a lot of parents are quietly Googling isn't 'what jacket do I need.' It's 'can my kid actually do this, and how do I not ruin it for them?' In short, the answer is yes! A confident five-year-old can manage an overnight bikepacking trip if you keep the route flat, the distance conservative, and let the adult carry the majority of the gear.

This is what we did, what I'd do again, and what I'd tweak, if you're thinking about taking your own five-year-old (or thereabouts) on their first overnighter.

 

Trip snapshot

Trip type: Father-son overnight bikepacking
Destination: Northern Rivers Rail Trail, riding from Murwillumbah to Hosanna Farmstay, NSW
Season: Winter (we went in July). Mild days, cold-ish nights, and, as it turned out, a full night of rain
Trip length: Two days, one night: ride in, camp, ride out
Accommodation: Camping at the farm stay
Key packing challenge: Getting nearly all our gear onto one bike, because his bike had zero room to carry anything and legs already spinning flat out

 

 

Can a 5-year-old go bikepacking?

If you haven't ridden it, the Northern Rivers Rail Trail is a converted old rail line running about 24km from Murwillumbah out to Crabbes Creek in northern NSW, close to the Queensland border. It's a proper family-friendly trail with a mix of sealed path through the townships and compacted gravel through farmland and rainforest, with old rail bridges along the way and barely any climbing because, well, it used to be a railway. Hosanna Farmstay sits roughly halfway and is the only accommodation actually on the trail, which makes it the obvious target for a first overnighter; you're not guessing about where you'll end up sleeping.

I'd ridden the trail before and always clocked the farm stay as a good 'someday' spot to bring my little guy. This was the someday. About 10km in from Murwillumbah felt like the right distance. It was far enough to feel like an adventure, and short enough that we could ride out, set up camp and actually have time to enjoy being there, then pack up and ride home the next day without anyone hitting a wall.

The other thing that shaped this trip: his bike is a 16-inch single speed with no gears at all, and he's about at the tail end of what that bike can do before he graduates to a 20-inch (did someone say 6th birthday present?). Between the single gear and the smaller wheels, there's a real cap on how far he can ride and how much he can carry. But that's kind of the point of a trip like this... you don't wait for the 'perfect' setup, you just go with whatever bike you've got. We did put a backpack on him with a couple of items in there to make him feel like he was contributing to the carry, but realistically, everything beyond a small snack and a stove had to live on my bike.

This was never about covering ground. I can run further on my own in an hour than we rode across the whole day. It was about the stopping, not the riding, looking at things along the way, checking on the cows, a snack break, another snack break.

 

 

Essential Bikepacking Gear: What We Used

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My bike is a Canyon Grizl, which is already set up as a bikepacking rig, so it did almost all the heavy lifting, literally.

• Saddlebag: Frame and saddle bags carried a chunk of our clothing and camp gear. Mattered most for keeping that weight low and on the bike rather than piling everything onto my back.
• Top tube bag: This Osprey bag carries phone and snacks, the stuff we needed on the actual ride without stopping to dig through anything else.
• Fork-mounted cages: I ran these bike mount cages to carry our sleeping mats. They freed up the saddlebag and pack for softer, more awkward gear, and kept the mats out of the way of my legs.
• 20L hiking daypack: The Aarn Pace Magic 20 is more of a hiking pack than a bike pack, but it fits like a running vest, which makes it good on a bike. It became the catch-all for the rest: food, spare layers, first aid, the bits that don't have an obvious bike-bag home. It mattered most on the gravel sections where a fully loaded bike gets twitchier. Having some weight on my back instead of all on the bike kept handling predictable.
• Tent on the handlebars: the Big Agnes Copper Spur HV UL3 Bikepack. This is genuinely built for exactly this: it straps to the bars, packs down small, and fits three, which meant there was room for him, me, and a fair bit of gear inside for a wet night. It mattered most once the rain set in and we needed somewhere dry enough to play cards for hours without feeling like we were on top of each other.
• Sleep system: a Therm-a-Rest NeoLoft, another mat I'm currently testing for a factory contact, a Nemo Kayu sleeping bag, and a second bag I'm also trialling. These days sleep comfort is non-negotiable for me, getting older will do that to you, so the NeoLoft came along even though it's a chunkier mat than most people would pick for bikepacking. It still rolled down small enough to strap to the bike without a fuss. Kit testing is part of my job now too, so this trip did double duty. What mattered on the night was simple: it was cold enough after the sun went down that a proper sleep system, not a summer-weight one, made the difference between him sleeping through and not.
• Cook kit: a small titanium gas stove, a Traverse titanium pot, and a couple of UCO sporks. I'd usually take titanium sporks, but titanium isn't exactly colourful or fun when you're five. Small and light, and boiled water fast for noodles. It mattered most later that night when we ended up using it for an unplanned job (more on that below).
• My co-pilot's pack: his school backpack is bloody massive, so I dug out his old kinder one instead. It's no Osprey or Hyperlite. It's a Smiggle, yes, the stationery brand that makes pencil cases! Just a small backpack with the food and the stove in it. I wanted him carrying something that actually mattered to the trip, not just a token load, so he'd feel like part of the operation rather than cargo. When we got to camp I discovered he'd also smuggled in a Spiderman toy, despite a full week of 'no extra weight' negotiations about what does and doesn't fit on a bike. By the time I found it, it had already done the full 10km undetected. Sneaky little operator.

 

 

The moment it went sideways, literally

By the second day my boy was riding like he'd done ten of these, he was confident, chatty, loving it. He was confident enough that I looked away for a second, and he decided to try riding no-hands about a kilometre from the finish. I heard an almighty crash, looked up, and he'd gone off the edge of the path, down a rock wall embankment, into the dirt.

It clearly hurt. There was dirt packed into every vent hole in his helmet, which tells you it was a proper head-first tumble. But he handled it well. A few tears, a check-over, and he was back on the bike within a few minutes, more subdued but fine. If there's a lesson in there, it's not to hover and try to stop it happening. That's exactly how kids build the judgement to know their own limits, a stack now, on soft dirt, with a helmet doing its job, teaches him more than any amount of me calling out 'careful' ever could. He knew he'd pushed it a bit far, and he worked that out himself.

 

 

Marshmallows in the vestibule

It rained all night at Hosanna. Properly rained. I'm talking enough rain that the campfire and the marshmallows-round-the-fire plan I'd promised him were off the table. That's the bit nobody puts in the trip report... the plan you had in your head rarely survives contact with the actual conditions, whether you're on a bike or halfway up a mountain, and most of the skill is just improvising the next best thing. So we cooked the marshmallows on the camp stove in the tent vestibule instead, which honestly became one of the better memories of the trip rather than a consolation prize.

Between rain breaks we snuck out for short rides or wandered over to feed the farm animals. The rest of the time we were in the tent playing Uno and working through a snack platter I'd packed. None of the gear struggled with the rain. That's sort of the baseline expectation when it's your day job. The real story of the wet night wasn't about the kit: it was about how much you can pack into a tent with a five-year-old and a deck of cards when the weather has other plans.

 

 

What worked best when bikepacking with a young child

Using Hosanna Farmstay as the target took most of the risk out of a first overnighter. We always knew exactly where we'd sleep, and there was enough going on (animals, space to explore) to fill the downtime. Giving the kid his own pack with a real job in it (food and the stove) mattered more than I expected. He talked about 'his jobs' the whole way out. And breaking the ride into short, silly goals (lolly breaks every few kilometres, racing each other between km markers) did more to keep him motivated than any amount of 'you're doing great, mate.'

Letting him make his own calls worked too, even the dumb ones. Early on he insisted on riding the roughest part of the gravel because it looked more fun, and no amount of me suggesting the smoother line changed his mind. By day two, after two days of being rattled around on it, he was yelling out 'I hate gravel!', half-joking, half not. He worked that one out for himself, far better than I ever could have told him.

 

 

What I'd pack differently next time

Honestly, not much on the gear side, which I suppose is the upside of doing this for a living: the kit did exactly what it needed to. That's an easy thing for me to say working in the industry, but the advice holds even if you don't. Don't wait until you've got a dedicated bikepacking tent, the 'right' tyres, or every bag sorted before you do a trip like this. Take whatever you've already got and go; you can work out the finer points of the kit later. If anything's changing for us, it's not gear, it's bike. He's getting a bigger bike for his birthday this year, and once he's off a single-speed 16-inch, we'll have a few more options for where we go and how far. But that's a nice problem to have, not something we were missing this time. Don't wait for the 'right' bike to do a trip like this; just go with whatever your kid's riding now.

 

 

Key takeaways / lessons learned

Plan the distance around your kid's bike, not your own fitness. A single-speed with no gears is the limiting factor, not how far you could ride solo. A farm stay or similar halfway accommodation takes the biggest unknown out of a first trip: where you'll actually sleep.

Give your kid something real to carry, even if it's small, because the ownership matters more than the weight. Small, frequent rewards beat big distant ones for keeping five-year-old legs turning. And don't let rain change the plan. Just move the marshmallows into the vestibule.

The other thing I didn't expect: 'Mum' is easily the most-said word in our house at the moment, so two days of hearing 'Dad' on repeat, on his terms, doing something that was entirely ours, was worth the trip on its own. There's something different about being the only adult around for two straight days. No handing off when he's tired or over it, no tag-team, just the two of us sorting out the small stuff together like, whose turn to pick the game, how many lollies count as a 'big' break, which way the tent zip goes.

He went from nervously eyeing off the big kids riding through puddles halfway up their tyres, to us doing exactly that ourselves a dozen times over and coming home covered in mud, laughing every time. Even the crash became part of it in the end; he was back on the bike telling me about it like it was already a good story. That's the bit I'll actually remember, not the 10km, not the gear, not even the rain. Trips like this were never really about the ride. They're about giving a kid two days where the only job either of you has is being together.

 

Bikepacking With Kids: FAQs

How far can a five-year-old realistically ride on a bikepacking trip?

It depends heavily on the bike. On a single-speed 16-inch with no gears, we found around 10km each way on flat, well-surfaced trail was a good, achievable target without pushing him into misery. A bike with gears and bigger wheels would open that up.

What age can kids start bikepacking?

There's no fixed age: it comes down to how confidently your child can already ride, and whether the trail suits their bike. Rail trails, with their gentle grades and easy surfaces, are a good testing ground for a first attempt from around five or six.

Is the Northern Rivers Rail Trail suitable for kids?

Yes: it's flat, well-surfaced, family-friendly, and essentially traffic-free (just a couple of quiet road crossings the whole way), with the added bonus of Hosanna Farmstay roughly halfway along the Murwillumbah to Crabbes Creek section, giving you a natural, low-stress overnight stop.

Do I need a special bike for my kid to go bikepacking?

No: he rode his regular 16-inch Specialised Riprock. The main consideration is that a small kid's bike usually has no capacity to carry gear, so plan on the adult bike (or bikes) carrying the load.

How do you carry gear for two people on one bike?

We split the load across a saddlebag, fork-mounted cages for the sleeping mats, a 20L hiking daypack on my back, and the tent strapped to the handlebars. Spreading weight between the bike and your body helps keep handling predictable once the trail gets rougher.

What food works for a kids' bikepacking trip?

Keep it simple and fast: we did noodles for dinner and a snack platter for entertainment over a card game. Frequent small snacks (we did 'lolly breaks' every few kilometres) also do a lot of work keeping young legs motivated on the ride itself.

What happens if it rains on a bikepacking trip with a young kid?

Plan for indoor-tent entertainment as seriously as you plan the ride: cards, games, and a stove that can safely run in a tent vestibule turned a rained-out night into one of the best parts of our trip.

How do you keep young kids motivated on longer rides?

Small, frequent, silly incentives beat big distant ones. Snack breaks and racing between kilometre markers worked far better for us than promising a reward at the end.

 

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If you need any help, chat with our friendly team of Outdoor Gear Specialists in-store or online today and don’t forget to share your adventures with us on Instagram by tagging @wildearthaustralia and #mywildearth in your next post.